1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to apparatus and methods for co-location and off-loading of web site traffic based on traffic pattern recognition. More specifically, the present invention is directed to apparatus and methods for profiling web sites, determining which web sites should be co-located and when offloading of web traffic to other servers should be performed.
2. Description of Related Art
With the increasing popularity of the Internet and its applications, the allocation of resources in order to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) has become more difficult. The complexity of the problem of resource allocation is exacerbated by the heterogeneity of the Internet infrastructure and applications as well as the user behaviors.
One approach to the resource allocation problem is to share resources, such as web servers, among multiple entities, such as web sites, so that peak load conditions for any given entity can be handled by borrowing resources from other entities. Such a mechanism is often referred to as co-location. An important problem in this paradigm is concerned with the clustering of the web sites for the resource sharing. That is, it is often difficult and imprecise manual process to identify which web sites should share resources.
Another approach, which is complementary to co-location, consists of offloading work for an entity to exogenous resources in a dynamic way. With offloading, web site traffic that is destined for a particular web server that is currently in an overloaded state is redirected to another server to handle the processing of the traffic. A key problem with offloading is determining where and when to offload the work. The known mechanisms for determining where and when to offload work typically fall into the area of load balancing where current state information is used to determine if the work load should be balanced by sending some of the work to other servers. Such work load balancing mechanisms are reactionary and do not make use of known patterns of traffic to begin offloading prior to the servers becoming overloaded.
Thus, it would be beneficial to have an improved apparatus and method for determining which web sites should be co-located and when traffic to web sites should be offloaded to other web servers.